


a vision softly creeping

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Assassins Guild, Gen, Guilt, Mimes, Minor Character Death, Self-Harm, heartbreak ice cream TM, i don't even know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:33:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25494670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Downey enables a waking nightmare. Vetinari won't stay in one genre, you can't make him.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack:
> 
> School at Night - Goblin
> 
> this is me trying - Taylor Swift

Pranks were on the syllabus. Breaking into the Assassin’s Guild was decidedly not.

Unfortunately the coterie of mimes planning the prank had an ally in the Assassins Guild.

Liam Downey was certain Dog-Botherer needed a comeuppance. There was no way anyone was supposed to be so cool and confident and infuriatingly unperturbed.

He felt okay about the physical fights they had gotten into, especially the ones where Dog-Bother was angry enough to punch or kick rather than relying on a deceptively vice like grip until Downey got freaked out and asked to be let go. How was the little weirdo able to do that? It was like being held in a wristlock by an Ephebian Spartoi. He could feel the bones in the boy’s palm.

In years to come Sybil Ramkin would remark that while other people were bullied for their interests or appearance or name or how they talked or how well they did on exams, Havelock Vetinari was bullied for being Havelock Vetinari.

He seemed genuinely surprised by this assessment. He hadn’t thought of what Downey did to him as bullying. That would necessitate the notion that the bigger, older, more popular boy was on the favored side of a power imbalance and that was just inconceivable.

But Sybil said he hadn’t heard what Downey said about him behind his back or how he had turned people against him.

Havelock had sat down hearing that. The lonely, awkward decade of undergraduate school days unfurling in his minds eye. He’d been in survival mode and hadn’t even realized it. But damn it, he smirked up at Sybil’s tiled ceiling, he was good at surviving.

Liam Downey met the mimes in a pub. They were disconcerting, he had to admit. The way they moved was too deliberate, too controlled. They spoke without using any vocalization or sign language and their whole faces were covered in paint. They were frightening, but the important thing, in the dim half-light of the evening, was that they were less frightening than the Botherer of Dogs.

He told them what he understood of the plan they had communicated with him. They would enter the guild hall at the beginning of the next semester, dressed in black, together with as many student assassins as would agree to wear mime makeup. Then they would fill the space and make it seem like the Guild had entered a nightmare world of mime-assassins. Of course everyone would be silent.

It was the Guild of Fools, Mimes and Joculators’ idea of a prank, which wasn’t Downey’s, but fit well enough into the tradition of school pranks.

-

In his fourth year of graduate school, Vetinari stayed in the guild over the winter break. On the first day of the new term, he awoke to a crisp winter day that the name of the month ‘Ick’ belied. Frost built crenellations across the room’s sheet glass windows. He stretched in the light, like the annoyingly chipper morning person that he was. He’d gone to sleep at six in the morning.

He padded down the stone stairwell in slippers to the bathroom. He was happily humming a song he had never heard at the wrong tempo. In the bathroom a student was applying what looked like clown makeup, which was unusual but not outside the purview of of usual student behavior.

He didn’t realize anything was strange until he got to the ground floor and then it was like the world had turned ninety degrees. The halls were filled with people in black robes and cloaks and coats, as they usually were, but now they were wearing monochrome makeup, often with triangles and tears painted under their eyes. There was no sound. Assassins knew how to be silent and Fools Guild mimes also had the art of creating a vacuum of sound. They moved strangely, like they were clockwork or on strings. Unsettled, Vetinari wished he had asked for a paper schedule. Was Systematic Musicology in M7 or M5? The classrooms looked the same.

The clock in the hallway seemed to have stopped ticking. It was supposed to be nine-thirty. Was it nine-thirty?

With a nightmare logic suited to the vision of murderous mimes cavorting in slow motion, he felt like if he chose the right classroom, everything would be okay. Five or seven? A coin flip. On one side the head of a man who wanted him dead, on the other side, Roderick and Keith, the only pair-bonded hippopotami known to science.

One of the mime-assassins moved as though prodding him with an invisible sword and he felt it. Vetinari felt it the way an errant pencil digging into your arm while you slept incorporated itself into your dream.

He realized he didn’t have good visibility where he was standing. There were assassin-mimes behind him. He tried to listen for the silence of footsteps, but it was all pervading. No lack of sound could be distinguished from the velvet hush that lay over everything.

Suddenly there were hands on his waist. He reacted automatically. Spinning, his elbow connected with the head of the man behind him, throwing him against the wall, where the sound that broke the silence was a sickening crunch.

For the first time in his life, Havelock Vetinari fainted.

When he woke up, he was sprawled across the one upholstered chair in room M7 (tails. hippopotami.) desperately hoping that the past fifteen minutes had been a dream.

Ludo was trying to get him to drink something.

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s pineapple juice.” The Fools Guild had imposed some kind of embargo about pineapples. This was not a good sign.

“You don’t know?”

Ludo shrugged.

“I hope it’s poisoned,” Vetinari said, taking the glass.

“His name was Benoît.” Ludo watched the blood drain from Vetinari’s face.

“I killed a Fool.”

“Technically you killed a mime. He thought you might be ticklish. Legally it’s a suicide.”

Vetinari dug his fingernails into his arm. “I used to scream, in the Wool Guild, if anyone tried to do that, so someone could get them away from me before I hurt them. Just a really high pitched yell. I thought I had so much more self-control than this. I thought I was undisturbable. That I took no action without thought. I’m an adult. I’m a teacher. Ye gods.”

“You’re... You’re making yourself bleed,” Ludo said, uncertain what he should do about this.

“Where’s the class?” Vetinari asked, pulling his sleeve down over his wrist.

“M5. They were supposed to be in here. They didn’t want to disturb you in case you woke up and decided to dash more people’s brains out.”

“I think I would like to join them. I think I am... In denial.”

“Let me know when you get back. Buy me a postcard.” Ludo knew his audience when it came to terrible puns and Vetinari nearly smiled.

-

When Downey heard that Vetinari had attended all of his classes and seemed his usual self, while he, Downey, had shrouded the corpse of the hapless mime and been overcome with guilt, he decided that a) he wanted to kill Vetinari and b) that would be impossible. He couldn’t even think of him as Dog-Botherer anymore. The man was a murderer. He’d broken the most basic principle of being an Assassin and it wasn’t the first time. He’d killed people without contracts during the revolution. People who were just following orders and not following them well. The worst part was that he never seemed to take consequences. If Downey had caused the death of a Fool any more directly than he had by leading them into this death trap of a Guild, he would be dead before ten in the morning, or worse, _entertained._

All he’d wanted was a prestigious career and to be at the top of the schoolboy social pyramid. He hadn’t wanted to acquire a nemesis. Not one that killed without tender loving care.

But if he couldn’t kill Dog- that is, Vetinari, he could at least give the monster a piece of his mind. 

He ran up the corner stairwell to Vetinari’s room, which was the fifth largest single apartment available to students in the Guild. Self-serving git. Of course, Downey was in the fourth largest, but at least he hosted parties and things.

The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. To his surprise all the blinds were pulled down and the room was illuminated by a multi-wick candle that smelled like soy wax and vanilla. Vetinari was lying beside a heap of crumpled blankets curled around a squround container of ice cream. He was holding a book with a magenta cover called “Lunar Eclipse of the Heart.” His eyes were closed and he was meditatively licking a spoon stolen from the dining hall. 

“I thought you didn’t like ice cream,” Downey said, thrown by this spectacle.

“I don’t. But I can’t get drunk. Have a weird metabolism.” Vetinari didn’t open his eyes. 

“You killed a young man named Benoît. He had just been hired by the Selachiis’ niece’s experimental theatre company.” 

Vetinari rolled over onto his back and opened his eyes. Contrasted with the blue-dark blue, since Vetinari’s pupils were dilated in the dark-Downey realized how red-rimmed they were.

“Feel like shit,” Vetinari said. Downey didn’t think he’d ever heard him swear before.

“You’re just a normal person, underneath it all, aren’t you?”

“Downey, what the fuck does that mean? Underneath what? I am not an onion.” He closed his eyes again. “I do think sometimes in trying to keep from being desensitized to death, I pull the scab tissue off my soul. But even then I’m not sure I have one. A sensorium kept in pain to be reminded it exists eventually goes numb. What do you do then? If you cut deeper you damage the nerves. Somewhere you have to find a wall to push off of to swim back to the surface. To recognize your face in the mirror.”

“Okay, I take it back,” Downey said. In a moment he felt his heart break. He’d wanted to kill this man? Over an accidental death? He’d wanted to hurt- No, _had_ hurt, had hurt and exhausted and isolated like a wolf hunting a fox. There was a technical term for it in ecology. Hunting a perceived competitor was called IGP, Intraguild Predation. 

“What was that phrase of yours about Assassins crying?”

“Assassins don’t cry over deaths because if they did they would never stop,” Downey said. 

“I think I shall cry about this werewolf novel and the ice cream hurting my stomach.”

“I let the mimes into the building,” Downey admitted. “I think I shall join you. Do you have another spoon?”


	2. Chapter 2

“Here, how about this,” Havelock said, turning the page, “As long as you do not trust me, I cannot trust you, but I can trust your distrust. When both waver, I waver. We waver and I hope. The moonlit wolf is hoping.”

He skipped ahead a few lines. “Of three things I was absolutely certain. One, Garen was a pâtissier. Two, there was a part of me, and there was no telling how dominant that part might be that wanted to ignore that everything about him and his work was processed in a facility that also processes chocolate. Three, there was a sign on the door that said ‘Sorry, no dogs allowed.’”

“That is so sad,” Liam Downey hiccuped, “no dogs allowed.” He had poured rum over the ice cream and was consuming what Havelock had left in the carton as a sort of lukewarm milkshake.

“They have passionate sex in chapter nine. I skipped to the end of that part.”

“Dog-Botherer?”

“Mmm?”

“I’ve never really thought this- that is, you in this context- I mean, obviously you’re-“

Havelock arched an eyebrow.

“Are you asexual?”

Vetinari sighed heavily and pushed the soggy ice cream carton off the bed. It fell on its side on the floor and seeped softly into the ancient carpet. “I don’t know.”

“Have you ever been in a relationship with anyone?”

“I think you would have noticed, seeing as we’ve lived in the same building for twelve years.”

“I thought maybe in Überwald... You didn’t really try to hide the bite marks.”

“Yeah, that was fun. But no, I’ve never even kissed anyone.”

Somehow the soft candlelight made confessions feel easier. “When I was realizing I was gay I thought maybe there was—“

“Oh, I know I’m gay, I just don’t know if I’m asexual. I am extremely secure in the knowledge that I am gay.” Havelock realized he was interrupting. “Sorry. Do continue.”

“I felt like there should be some kind of checklist. Some way to understand what was real and what was lies you were telling yourself because this isn’t the story you were told you were in.”

“When did you know?”

“When I was eighteen. Ended up upstairs at one of the Hogswatch parties.”

“I was five,” Vetinari said.

“You can’t know you’re gay when you’re five years old.”

“I did. Schoolyard crushes, the concept of having a boyfriend...”

“You’re, like, not even a person when you’re five.”

“Well, nobody told me that at the time.”

Downey looked at the rum and ice cream soaking into the carpet. “I was awful to you for so long.”

There was the eyebrow again. “You were awful to a lot of people.”

“Some of them deserved it.”

“Do you think I enjoy having a flock of power-hungry, cowardly aristocrats not realizing that the reason they’re offering to carry my books is because I consoled them after your torments? Do you think I like it when they assume I think like them because I was kind for thirty minutes?”

“You do actually let them carry your books.” Downey pointed out.

“Yes, I’m hoping they’ll read the titles or look at the pictures.”

“I think they think ‘anarchia’ is a kind of spider.”

“Maybe that’s for the best.” Havelock looked up at the ceiling

“Diadems—drop—

And Doges—surrender—

Soundless as dots—

On a Disk of Snow.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s from a poem.” Vetinari seemed exhausted and Downey wondered if he ought to leave.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You came up here wanting to denounce me,” Vetinari observed.

“Yeah that was... Sometimes I forget that you’re the one around here with actual morals.”

“That’s kind of the plan.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Keep pretending you hate me, but please pull the punches, the bruises heal slowly.”

“Gods, I’m so sorry Dog-Botherer.”

“And use my name. I’ve got two of them. Choose either one, I’m not picky.”

“Goodnight, Havelock.”


End file.
